• SMB Customers, BI Projects Lift SAP’s First Quarter

  May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software bellwether SAP pulled off a pretty decent first quarter despite all the trials and tribulations at the company that lead to the ouster of its chief executive officer, Leo Apotheker in February. For the quarter ended in March, SAP’s sales rose by 5 percent, to €2.51 billion, and net income was nearly doubled, to €387 million. In the quarter, new software license sales hit €464 million, up 11 percent compared to a pretty awful first quarter in 2009, and support revenues were up by the same amount, to €1.39 billion. Subscription and other revenues relating to SAP’s online

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• Stacking Up New Power7 Against Power6/6+ Blades

  April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Major Correction: In this story, I thought the price to activate either i 6.1 or i 7.1 per core on the new Power Systems 701 blade server was $2,250 a pop plus $250 per user, as it is on the Power Systems 700 blade, since both are single-socket blades. Nope. The PS701 blade has the same ridiculous price as the two-socket PS702 blade. So my analysis below is for the PS701 is not correct. I have updated this analysis and the price/performance table in the May 10 issue, which you can read here. When IBM announced the new Power7-based

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• RPG Open Access Is No Panacea, Say BCD and LANSA

  April 26, 2010 Dan Burger

  For every up, there’s a down. For every left, there’s a right. Two people watch the same movie and one says it was everything I hoped it would be and more while the other says it’s a poorly done remake of a movie from 10 years earlier. The just-released IBM i 7.1 operating system, and in particular the feature known as Open Access, already has prompted opinions about what it is and what it can do. Not everyone thinks it’s the greatest thing since Timex determined its watches could take a licking and keep on ticking. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

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• Power Systems Slammed by Power7 Transitions in Q1

  April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may have announced new Power Systems iron based on Power7 processors in the middle of the first quarter, but because they didn’t ship until a few weeks later, the new machinery did not do all that much to help Big Blue’s finances during the first quarter. But IBM is, by design, an engine with multiple cylinders, and luckily even while the Power Systems and mainframe pistons were sticking a little, X64 servers and software were firing nicely and helped fill in some gaps. In the quarter ended in March, IBM’s overall sales rose by 5 percent to $22.9 billion,

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• As I See It: Depriving the Senses

  April 26, 2010 Victor Rozek

  One of the more intriguing but seldom quoted lines of English letters comes to us courtesy of James Joyce. It’s from a short story called A Painful Case, part of a collection of 15 stories about Irish life titled Dubliners. In one brief sentence Joyce not only introduces his main character, but manages to capsulize the totality of his cheerless existence: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” With poetic brevity Joyce speaks of dissociation, lack of awareness, and a life largely void of sensory input. And although Joyce never sat in front of a computer

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• UNICOM Loses in Court, Forces SoftLanding Customers to Upgrade

  April 26, 2010 Alex Woodie

  A U.K. court ruled against UNICOM Systems in February in a lawsuit it brought against a former SoftLanding business partner that developed components of the TurnOver change management tool critical to BPCS environments. Following the loss of its lawsuit and a countersuit filed by the partner, UNICOM unveiled a new version of TurnOver and announced that SoftLanding customers must upgrade to the new release or risk losing technical support. UNICOM is appealing the decision. The case between UNICOM/SoftLanding and KDP Software Limited involved two software products that KDP developed and supported for SoftLanding. Specifically, it involved SET/TURN and Documentor, two

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• Looks Like Two Entry Power7 Systems Are On The Way

  April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I had been hoping, like many of you, that IBM had kept some of its Power7 server powder dry for the COMMON user group meeting in Orlando, Florida, next week. Perhaps divulging its plans for an entry Power Systems machine to succeed the current Power 520–I have been calling it the Power 720–and to maybe get back into the fight against entry X64 iron machines with a truly entry server–what I am calling the Power 710. Well, it doesn’t look like this is going to happen. As far as I know, there are no additional Power Systems announcements coming at

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• SAP Tests Prove i 7.1 Performance Boost Over i 6.1

  April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The new i For Business 7.1 operating system for Power Systems servers is not just about gussying up i 6.1.1 a little and slapping a new label on it, but making some real changes to the operating system to goose performance on a number of workloads. As The Four Hundred reported last week, IBM made a bunch of improvements in the DB2 for i database, and as it turns out IBM has put the new Power 750 server through some benchmark paces to show how the upgraded software can goose even a new machine. While i 6.1.1 will technically

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• Advanced Job Scheduler Prices Go Up Dramatically

  April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM rarely explains why it raises prices on its software, and last week was no exception when prices for most of the features affiliated with the Advanced Job Scheduler for i were jacked by Big Blue. If you read announcement letter 310-163, IBM said that it had raised the price on the Advanced Job Scheduler edition related to the OS/400 and i5/OS V5 releases, which is product number 5722-JS1 in the IBM catalog. This version has been around since April 2001 and has been enhanced through January 2006; it will be withdrawn from marketing in January 2011, when support

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• IBM Chops Power 570 to 770/780 Memory Upgrade Tags

  April 26, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With more than two decades of stories sprinkled with typos and the occasional math errors, I would be the last one to criticize when someone else slips up when they are tired. But it looks like someone at IBM didn’t key the right number in as part of the new Power 770 and Power 780 server launches from February. Last week, in announcement letter 310-164, IBM cut the price of converting large blocks of DDR2 main memory (256 GB of activations, to be precise) on a Power 570 to 100 GB of memory activations on a new Power 770

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